With the promulgation of mobile communications, the rate at which devices process data has increased significantly, leading to significant increases in the required throughput of these devices. In an attempt to meet these throughput requirements, turbo decoders (as used in air interfaces like Long Term Evolution (LTE), High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA), Time Division Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access (TD-SCDMA) which receive and decode data are typically realized by splitting an input block into several sub-blocks and processing them in parallel.
However, increasing the parallelism of the decoding process may result in performance degradations in terms of block error rate (BLER) or user data throughput (user-Tput) (e.g., the rate of received and acknowledged bits per second) through the introduction of errors at the boundaries of the sub-blocks, which may be significant depending on the code block size and the degree of parallelism. Another performance relevant parameter is the number of half-iterations of the decoding process. Increasing the number of half-iterations of the decoding process may result in an improved BLER or user-Tput, but also in an increase in processing time. Furthermore, increasing the window size of the decoding process, which is typically necessary for higher code rates, may also result in an improved BLER or user-Tput which comes at the expense of an increased processing time.